Stronger Stuff
by keep it secret
Summary: A series of one-shots dealing with Spacer!Shep's relationship with her parents, mostly her mother. Fem!Shep, Spacer/Sole Survivor. Occasional bouts of Fem!Shep/Garrus. ME1 and ME2.
1. Stronger Stuff

**A/N: **There never seems to be much stuff on Spacer Shepards, which seems a shame, considering they're the only ones with canon, living, immediate family. So I'm writing a small series of one-shots that explore a Spacer/Sole Survivor's relationship with her family and how it affects her before, during, and after ME1 and ME2. More to come. Feedback appreciated.

* * *

_We're made of stronger stuff._

This was the mantra that ran throughout Esme Shepard's life. It was something her mother used to tell her as she grew up, a claim to a greater legacy of Macguiness women who always overcame adversity. Though she no longer carried the name, Hannah Shepard always stood tall with pride for the line she had come from and the blood her daughter carried. _Macguiness women_, she would tell Esme, _are able to endure. And you are no exception._

It was the comforting reassurance when she was a child and making friends was difficult due to her parents' constant reassignments. It was the steady hand on her shoulder when she crashed through the physical and emotional turmoil of puberty. It was the long gaze from her mother at her father's funeral. It was the undercurrent of the hard good-bye as she left for Alliance military basic training.

Stronger stuff, Shepard grunted to herself as she overcame each challenge from her superiors. Stronger stuff, she smiled as she was recruited into the N7 program. Stronger stuff, she muttered under her breath, willing herself not to lose control, not to look at the torn corpses of her fellow marines. Stronger stuff, whispered her mother, holding her child as the Thresher Maws danced beneath her daughter's eyelids.

The mantra carried her through every trial she faced. From the husks of Eden Prime to the gargantuan botanical horror of Feros, she told herself about Macguiness women and why they endured. When the chill of Noveria cut her to the bone and the heat of Therum made it hard to breathe, she thought of those that came before her. When she watched the explosion rock Virmire, and when she stared down the barrel of Saren's gun, her lips formed a thin line and she knew only one thing.

And when she felt the air escaping from her oxygen tank, as the panic began to overtake her, all rational thought was driven from her save one errant phrase.

As the blackness overtook her, one idea came fleeting through Shepard's shrieking mind.

_I'm supposed to be made of stronger stuff._


	2. A Lovely Service

**A/N:** This time, a look at Hannah Shepard through the lens of one of Shepard's friends. A short, somewhat awkward conversation. Set within a month of the destruction of the SSV Normandy.

* * *

Garrus attended the service, though he didn't much care for it. There was no body recovered, so there was no one in the coffin. The empty vessel only served to add a hollow right to every voice that spoke on Shepard's behalf, some lingering falsehood that left a bad taste in his mouth.

It was an enormous funeral. It seemed as though half the Citadel had shown up. At the very least, most of the human population made an appearance. Garrus sat close to the front, in the section reserved for the Normandy crew, surrounded by humans with the occasional peppering of himself, Tali, Wrex and Liara spread through the small section. Williams sat up on the platform along with Councilor Anderson and his assistant, each one contributing words to the ceremony. Joker, he noticed, was nowhere to be found.

Garrus knew the Normandy was a small vessel and thus had a small crew, but he hadn't expected to feel so dwarfed in comparison to the civilian attendees. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the Commander Shepard story so they could tell relate the story of the funeral years later, proclaiming, "I was there." It certainly wasn't Garrus's sort of service at all. There were precious few here that could claim they really _knew_ the Commander, and even fewer that could call her, "friend."

The entire thing didn't sit well with him. When each speaker had said their piece (Anderson spoke about the loss of a friend and Williams recited a piece of poetry, marking two of the only pieces of sentiment he had heard that afternoon), the crowd stirred and began to mingle. Garrus didn't much feel like talking to anyone. Instead, he ambled over to a corner and stewed over his dissatisfaction with everything that had happened, watching the assembled civilians milling about, Shepard's name on their lips.

At length, he growled to himself and made to leave. He only made it a few yards when a voice stopped him.

"Excuse me."

Though the words were polite, the tone made Garrus perk. It wasn't a request for attention; it was a demand for recognition that rang of every order from a superior officer he had ever heard. He turned on a heel, knowing that anyone capable of that sort of lingual dichotomy had to be worth his time.

A human woman in full Alliance military dress stared up at him. Her graying hair and wrinkling skin denoted an older female, but the sharp look in her eyes warned him against making any special cases for her age. He recognized her as one of the women who had sat in the front row. She had to be family. Something in her stance rang unerringly of Shepard.

"You're Officer Vakarian, I take it?"

Garrus nodded, resisting the urge to stand at attention. "That's me."

The human's gaze broke briefly to sweep across him. Her mouth twitched, and she appeared to make a decision. "Captain Hannah Shepard of the SSV Kilimanjaro," she announced, sticking out her hand. "I understand you served aboard the Normandy."

He shook the offered hand, replying, "Yes, though I took leave to return to the Citadel a few months back. I wasn't on board when…" he trailed off, unwilling to continue. After a beat, he latched onto a new thread of conversation. "So you're Shep…ah, the Commander's mother, I take it."

She nodded. "I am. Was," she said, correcting her tense with a sudden flinch. "She didn't mention me?"

Garrus ran a hand along his collar. A nervous habit he'd never broken. "She didn't volunteer much about herself. Always preferred to ask more than tell."

The Captain made a small, amused sound, and a wan smile passed across her face. Her eyes unfocused, and Garrus was loath to rouse the woman from what seemed at the least a bittersweet memory. When the silence stretched between them, though, he cleared his throat and searched wildly for some sort of human pleasantry to fill the space.

"It was a lovely service," he managed at last.

That was either the exact right thing to say or he had offended her greatly, judging by the way her head snapped up and the scrutiny with which she regarded him. One, two, three heartbeats of her stare, and then the human threw her head back and laughed. It wasn't the way Shepard had laughed at a clever turn of phrase, but it instead rang of the noise she made when she was frustrated and bitter.

"'Lovely,'" the Captain repeated. "I suppose it was, at that. But tell me, Officer Vakarian, do you think she would have liked it?" Every public relations seminar at C-Sec told him to say _yes, I'm sure she's very happy in [cultural/religious post-death consciousness belief]_, but the way the human peered up at him made every instinct in his body scream for honesty, else the small predator would tear him asunder.

"No," he relented, "No, she would have hated it. She would have stood there and listened, but she probably would have slunk off to some hole-in-the-wall bar in the Wards and gotten herself very drunk afterwards."

The human's shoulders sagged as though releasing a weight. "That sounds about right," said the Captain, and she regarded the turian with a weary smile. It was only at that point that Garrus noticed the bags beneath the woman's eyes and the very carefully-arranged mess that was her short hair. She hadn't been sleeping in some time, he guessed. This wasn't the captain of the Kilimanjaro, he thought. This was the grieving mother of a young woman.

"Was she always that bad about big public spectacles?" Garrus asked.

She chuckled, the firmness of her stance slipping. "She used to be worse at ad-libbing, I'll admit. You can't imagine how hard it used to be to get her up on a stage. Even at school plays."

Garrus scoffed. "Really? Shepard with stage fright?"

"The worst," the Captain confided. "Every time she had a line she would step forward and freeze. Her teachers had to feed her word by word until she finished the sentence. She kept getting more and more flushed every passing second. She would run off-stage whenever she finished, even if it was in the middle of the act."

"You're kidding," the turian said, laughing. "No wonder she never talked much about herself."

"Oh, Esme's just like that. She never thought she was interesting enough. It was hard enough getting anything new out of her when we mailed each other back and forth. Her letters were always filled with new things she had seen or the people she had met and what they were like. The past year was mostly the more interesting things she had thought about having such an eclectic interspecies crew."

Garrus coughed at that; he had the vague feeling he should be embarrassed for even being mentioned in her correspondences. "I imagine she was quite a different person in her letters."

"No," said the Captain, and her expression clouded over again, "you'd think that, but no." She offered him a smile. "Let me ask you something, Officer Vakarian. Gunnery Chief Williams suggested that we gather up a few of Esme's friends from the Normandy to get together in some hole-in-the-wall bar in the Wards and tell a few stories about her once this little affair has cleared out a bit. Would you care to join us? I'd like to know more about the woman my daughter had become over the past few years."

Garrus's mandibles flared in a grin. "That sounds like my kind of service, Captain."


	3. Trifling

**A/N:** This one's very, very short, but I thought it ended well where it did. Hannah Shepard's maiden name in these stories, Macguiness, is my own decision, as is Shepard's father's first name, Jim/James. We've only heard from one parent, so he's...more or less an OC.

Also- thank you for the feedback and favorites!

* * *

If there was one thing you needed to know about Hannah Macguiness, the very first thing you should have learned about her, it was that she was not a woman to be trifled with. She was stern, stiff, and demanding, with a reputation for getting things done. Those who followed her orders were rewarded, and those who disobeyed her were met with swift punishment.

Ask any man or woman on her crew about her, and they would give you a description roughly matching this one. Invariably, though, something would happen. They would glance around, as though looking for eavesdroppers, then turn to you and ask if they could tell you something off the record. He or she would lean in, and their voice would lower to a conspiratorial murmur. "Sure she's a bitch," they would acquiesce. "A huge bitch." And here their smile would stretch across their cheeks. "But I wouldn't trade her for any other commanding officer in the Alliance."

When Jim Shepard first heard about Commander Macguiness, he wrote her off as just another military ice queen. He had met enough of them to be able to identify them from a brief glance or description, and he was sure this one was no different. Jim had an old friend from basic who served under the woman, and when they managed to get together for drinks the conversation would invariably shift to the tough woman. They would laugh and trade stories about their respective superior officers, but over time his friend stopped laughing about Macguiness. Eventually he admitted his grudging but glowing respect for the woman, and Jim gave him a look of disbelief. His friend shrugged and said that he couldn't really explain it, which only served to further baffle him.

Intrigued, Jim started asking around whenever the ship Macguiness served aboard made port. Every time he got the chance, he asked a different member of her crew to tell him about the woman, and every time he was met with the same response: a full admission of everything that was wrong with her, then the glowing respect tucked away out of sight. His only explanations were either Stockholm Syndrome or the concept that there was something truly remarkable about Commander Macguiness. And whichever it was, he knew that he had to meet her to judge for himself.

And so it was that Jim Shepard trifled with Hannah Macguiness.


	4. A Rite of Passage

**A/N:** I'd kinda like to pick back up with the last chapter at some point, but this idea came first. Enjoy!

* * *

**A Rite of Passage**

Jim Shepard cracked his knuckles and rolled his neck. "Alright, honey," he said, and turned to the girl in the driver's seat next to him. "Are you ready?"

Esme gave her father a sullen look. "This is _still _pointless."

"Nonsense," he argued with a smile, "learning to drive is a rite of passage for all human kids."

"Then why don't any of my friends drive?" countered the teenager. "You know even Mom says it's stupid."

"'Stupid,' honey? Did your mother actually say that?" he asked, eyeing her.

Esme's head dropped. "No," she admitted. "She said that it's _unnecessary_. And she's right," said the girl, facing her father with a defiant glint in her eye. "Dad, I can't remember the last time I even saw a real vehicle aside from…from _this_." Esme's had flew in front of her, taking in the controls of the M-35 Mako they were seated in. "I don't need to drive when I live on ships or stations. I've never heard anyone say anything about a stupid 'rite of passage.' I could be out with my friends at the new club that just opened! Instead I'm sitting on some godforsaken wasteland in a big clunky vehicle I don't even need to learn how to operate." Esme folded her arms and thrust herself into the back of the chair with a final _fwump_.

Jim weathered his daughter's outrage with patience. In many ways, the girl was much like her mother, and Jim knew very well that he only needed to wait for her to expend herself before he could get anywhere in the conversation. "You can go out with your friends when we're done here, Esme," he offered.

"Mom still thinks this is dumb."

Jim resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Let me tell you a secret. You know how I always tell you that your mother is right, no matter what?"

Esme grunted and eyed him, curiosity overcoming her sulkiness.

"Well, the truth is I'm a horrible liar and your mother is dead wrong in this situation. See, she was raised on a space station, but I grew up on Earth. Being raised on the human homeworld, I obviously know more about what is and isn't tradition and necessary for humans to know. And as the Earthling expert, I say you do have to learn how to drive, and your mother doesn't know what she's talking about. Though," he added as an afterthought, "don't tell her I said that."

Esme stared at him, nonplussed.

Jim groaned. "Tell you what. The sooner we finish the sooner we can go home. And I'll throw in some extra spending money for you and your friends to have some fun tonight. Deal?" He extended a hand.

Esme glared at it, then snatched it in her own surprisingly firm grim. "Deal."

"That's my girl. So, hands at ten and two, check the mirrors…you know which is the accelerator and which is the brake? Okay, so ease it out of 'park' gently, gently…"

* * *

Jim stared bleakly at the wreckage. They had to call a salvage team to get together the largest pieces of the vehicle and put out the parts that were on fire. He had no idea how he was going to pay for this.

Beside him, Esme chattered, her expression bright. "Did you see where we came up on the hill and I was like, uuuughhhh this is going so slow we are never making it up, and you were like, we should go back down, and I was like, no wait and I floored it and we made it over and oh man I can't believe we actually did a corkscrew I love driving so much oh my god I gotta remember to take vids of this next time so I can show Becky and Padma oh hi Mom!"

Jim blinked, something at the tail end of her rambling pricking his ears. "Mom," he wondered, and turned his attention from the dwindling fires. "Mom!" he yelped when he noticed his wife sauntering towards them. "I mean, Hannah! Dear! Hi!" He winced at the manic edge to his voice. "I thought you weren't going to be back until Tuesday."

"Our inspection went faster than expected," she replied. Her expression was carefully blank, and not even Jim could decipher it and figure out whether she was amused or furious. This wasn't good.

"Mom, I can't believe you missed it!" Esme grinned. "You were so wrong; driving is awesome! I can't wait to go out again. I'm like the best driver ever. Dad said even he didn't get this far on his fist go. I'm a natural, can you believe it?"

Hannah's lips quirked. "I can't wait to hear all about it, honey, but didn't you mention something about meeting your friends tonight in your last mail?"

Esme's mouth clamped shut (and Jim exhaled in relief). She brought up her wrist and clicked a few buttons on her omnitool display, then let out a cry of horror. "Oh my god. The club! I forgot all about it!" she wailed, then dashed off to the vehicle Hannah had arrived in, her fingers a blur as she brought up a messaging interface.

The silence stretched between them as Hannah paced to Jim's side and eyed the wreck before turning her attention to some vague point in the distance.

"Did you two have a nice father-daughter outing?" she asked at length.

"It was a bonding experience," he said carefully.

"I see, I see," Hannah murmured.

Somewhere in the debris, an alarm went off, a garbled automated voice alerting a potential burglar that they were too close to the vehicle.

"So," Hannah prompted. Jim's eyes shifted to meet hers.

"Yes?"

She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, clearly expectant.

Jim could feel his face pucker as though tasting something very sour. He kept his mouth shut.

Hannah just stared at him, her expression the same. The skin around her eyes tightened, creasing the crow's feet that were beginning to wear into her face.

Jim held out a few moments longer before exhaling. "You were right," he relented. "You're always right."

Hannah's expression relaxed into a smug smirk. "There we go. Now how about we get out of here and let the men do their work? When we get home we can discuss whose paycheck this is primarily coming out of and exactly how our insurance agent is going to record this." She took off towards the vehicle where Esme waited. Jim could almost swear she had a spring in her step.

"Yes, dear," Jim groaned, and followed.


	5. Scars and Stories

**A/N:** Three short drabbles at three different times in Shepard's life with an overarching theme this time.

* * *

Her mother's skin was covered in scars. It used to be a game for her, when she was small. She would trace the faint white-and-pink lines that criscrossed the woman's body in the quiet hours they were allowed, following them with her fingers, as though she was tracing her way through a maze. She loved her mother for her jagged skin. Each scar held a story that, with enough pleading, she could ply from her mother's mouth. This one was from a training exercise gone wrong in her early military career, here was an old burn that calloused over from an overheated rifle, there was a bullet wound from a raid that never healed properly. Those three on her knee, she would admit with a twist to her smile, was from when she first started shaving her legs and could not properly control the razor.

She never minded the injuries she suffered when she was a girl running pell-mell through the stations or ships where she lived. Every time she would scrape her arm or cut her leg, she would look up at her mother with shining eyes, asking if it would scar. Of course, her mother and father both disapproved of her zeal, and before bed she explained to her that scars to take pride in were not something gained from reckless behavior, and the wounds that birthed the marred skin on her mother's body were not something she ever sought out. They were stories of the mistakes she made and the lessons she learned from them. "You'll earn your own in time, honey," she told her daughter, "but don't go looking for trouble just so you have a story to tell, okay?"

* * *

When she returned home after the disaster on Akuze, after the medal was pinned to her dress blues, and after she woke up terrified and sobbed into her mother's arms, they traced scars again, and her mother followed the new lines across her eyebrow and jagging down her chin. The ones she earned through mistakes, and the ones, her mother thought, that would teach her much more than a successful mission ever could. And some distant part of her that she regarded with creeping horror took pride in the marks on her daughter's face.

* * *

She wasn't surprised that her mother knew she was lying to her. Shepard had been very careful with the details she had slipped to the older woman (she was alive, she was on an important mission pertaining to the disappearances in the human colonies, she had gone through the Omega 4 Relay), but somehow Hannah Shepard had always been able to see through any deception her daughter tried to pass by her. When they got a quiet moment alone, her mother's stern joy at seeing her child again gave way to the cold anger that terrified her subordinates. If she was honest with herself, Shepard would admit she had been expecting it.

No, what surprised her was when Hannah revealed her daughter's tell. "There," she said, accusation lacing her tone, and turned Shepard's wrist to reveal the soft pink skin that had once been a scar from her early training in the service. "Here," and she pointed to a lightly freckled place on her forearm that had been a long scratch that had scarred after she picked too much at the scab. "These," she said, quieter now, and traced the lines that had once been her trophies from Akuze.

And Shepard swallowed, suddenly and horribly aware that her stories were gone.


End file.
